University of Utah
Department of Mathematics
April 2006, Awards Ceremony
Volume 6, Number 6
A f t e r m a t h
Message from the Chair
by Aaron Bertram
Back in July, Graeme gave me a copy of John
Conway's book "On Being a Department Head: A
Personal View." The book was full of useful
advice that has come in quite handy over the
year. But in one of the last chapters, Conway
asserted that a chair must not under any circumstances show up for work in shorts. Of
course I was wearing shorts and sitting in the
chair's office at the time, and that, my friends,
turned out to be a pretty prophetic moment.
This year has been quite a challenge. The
turnover in our senior office staff and the budget
holdbacks from the administration added a little
extra stress to the usual challenges of the first
year on the job. Everyone has been incredibly
supportive and we pulled through just fine, but
I still had quite a few of those "wearing shorts"
moments where I wished for a bit more experience.
Whatever the difficulties of the job, it is a true
privilege to be able to represent the
Mathematics Department. Let me brag a little
about our faculty's accomplishments. In a climate of global cutbacks in grant funding, we had
some great successes this year. Topping the list,
of course, is the new five-year VIGRE grant that
was won with a true collaborative effort from virtually every member of the department. Other
large grants were awarded to our math biology
and materials groups, as well as (informally so
far) to our representation theorists and topologists. In terms of individual honors, Christopher
Hacon won an AMS Centennial Fellowship,
marking the second year in a row that this has
gone to an algebraic geometer at Utah (YP Lee
was the winner last year), and Gordan Savin
won an ASUU student's choice teaching award
(the only such award in the entire College of
Science!) The recent US News report, ranking
our graduate program highest among all the programs at the University of Utah (Chronicle,
April 6) was just one more indication of the
regard that the nationwide mathematics community has for our department.
Getting recognition from the University is a little bit more of a challenge, and for this I appeal
to my senior colleagues on the faculty for help.
Quite frankly, we need more mathematicians on
important University committees. I am thinking
especially of the undergraduate council, the
University teaching committee, the University
promotion and tenure advisory committee, the
University research committee, and the graduate council. Without more mathematicians on
those committees to point out our accomplishments (and to explain our work!) we are at a real
disadvantage when it comes to University politics and the apportionment of resources and
awards.
Congratulations on a job well done to all our
undergraduates who are finishing this year and
who worked on REU projects, to all our Ph.D.
and Master's degree recipients, to our departing
assistant professors, and especially to Anne
Roberts, Jim Carlson and Steve Gersten in their
retirement from the department. Thank you to
Annetta and Nancy for all your years of incredible service. And thanks to all of you: staff, faculty and students, for your contributions, too
numerous to list (even for a mathematician) over
the past year!
Student Choice Award
Gordan Savin has received
the ASUU Student’s Choice
Award. This award is a
unique honor in that it is
completed student driven.
Only six of these awards
were given university-wide
this year. Andrew Nelson,
who nominated Savin, said, “In the two years
that I've known him, Dr. Savin has been instrumental in helping myself and other students
navigate the landscape of modern mathematics.
He is profoundly adept at providing context to
the problems and theorems we encounter, affording us a rare and valuable perspective that
undergraduates usually do not get to see or
develop until graduate school.” Congratulations
to Gordan on a job very well done!
Department of Mathematics • www.math.utah.edu • Phone 801 581 6851 • Fax 801 581 4148
VIGRE2
by David Dobson and Kathleen Moore
Our department has been supported for the past
five years by a "Vertical Integration of Research
and Education" (VIGRE) grant from the
National Science Foundation. This award, totaling nearly $3.8 million, has provided funding for
numerous programs within the department,
along with direct support for students (both
graduate and undergraduate) and postdocs.
These prestigious grants are awarded to only a
few departments around the country each year.
Our program has been particularly successful,
due to great innovation and careful planning by
the original VIGRE steering committee, and the
enthusiastic support of its participants.
Our department will be awarded another VIGRE
grant, to begin next fall. This new award follows
a great deal of effort and preparation by the
VIGRE2 steering committee: Fred Adler, Aaron
Bertram, Elena Cherkaev, David Dobson, Ken
Golden, Kathleen Moore, Gordan Savin, Klaus
Schmitt, Peter Trapa, and Jingyi Zhu. This committee spent many hours brainstorming program
ideas, collecting data, writing the proposal, and
preparing for the site visit. The steering committee would like to thank everyone who participated in the site visit, as this was an extremely
important factor in the success of the proposal.
The new grant will continue or expand many of
our existing programs: REUs, Math Circle, the
Summer High School Program, postdoctoral and
graduate fellowships, the ACCESS program, and
graduate mini-courses. The majority of the
requested $4.4 million budget (approximately,
over five years) goes directly to fund students
and postdocs. The grant is structured to work
cooperatively with the IGERT and RTG grants in
Math Biology, but is designed to benefit all members of the department.
New VIGRE2 opportunities will include a partnership with the MESA/STEP program
(Mathematics,
Engineering,
Science
Achievement/Science Technology Engineering
Programs), a dual-postdoctoral fellow program to
help increase diversity, development of undergraduate major tracks, changes in the first-year
graduate curriculum to introduce mathematical
survival skills and research areas, an REU
course to provide a group research experience
during the academic year, and an undergraduate
research conference in 2008.
Previously, only five other institutions have
received two consecutive VIGRE awards: North
Carolina State, UCLA, University of Chicago,
University of Washington, and University of
Wisconsin-Madison.
Sadly (or perhaps not for those who have committed so much time to these programs!), NSF
has ruled out the possibility of a third award.
Nevertheless, the department will continue in a
much stronger position at the conclusion of
VIGRE2, due to increased funding commitments
from the University of Utah, and the momentum
and structural improvements generated by ten
years of activity under the VIGRE programs.
Faculty Retirements
Three faculty have announced their retirement
this year, Jim Carlson, Steve Gersten, and Anne
Roberts.
Jim Carlson joined our faculty in 1975 as an
Assistant Professor. He received his Ph.D. from
Princeton University, and had been Assistant
Professor at Stanford and Brandeis prior to coming to Utah. Jim served as Department Chair
from 1995 until 2002. During his chairmanship,
he played a major role in bringing about of the
remodeling of LCB, the construction of the
Rushing Mathematics center and funding the
Warnock Chair. Since 2002, Jim has been
President of the Clay Mathematics Institute in
Boston, and plans to continue in that capacity.
Jim's research has been in
complex and algebraic geometry. Two of Jim's main
research interests are in
Variations of Hodge structures and the geometry of
moduli spaces of complex
manifolds. Utah has been a
fruitful place for Jim: he collaborated for fourteen articles with Domingo Toledo. Jim directed
three Ph.D. dissertations at Utah and coauthored/coedited five books.
Jim was very
involved in teaching. For example, from 20002005, he directed and taught the department’s
Summer Mathematics Program for High School
Students. He also ran a VIGRE summer REU in
knot theory in 2001 and a VIGRE summer minicourse on complex hyperbolic geometry in 2002.
Through Jim's efforts, MAPLE labs are now an
integral part of our linear algebra and differential equations courses. He also helped develop
Department of Mathematics, University of Utah, 155 South, 1400 East, Salt Lake City, UT 84112
our highly innovative sophomore course,
"Introduction to Scientific Computing using C."
Steve Gersten joined our faculty as professor in
1975. He had received his Ph.D. at Cambridge
University and was an instructor at Princeton
University, an Associate Professor at Rice
University and a Professor at University of
Illinois at Champaign-Urbana before coming to
Utah.
In earlier work, Steve became
renown as a specialist in algebraic K-theory. Later, he
became one of the world’s leading authorities in Geometric
Group Theory which he is
actively studying. In his later
work, he has been concerned
with relating very geometric notions about infinite groups such as filling radius, isoperimetric
inequalities and curvature to analytic notions
such as L1 cohomology to algebraic notions such
as presentability and small cancellation theory.
Steve has graduated ten Ph.D. students (six
from Utah) and initiated and organized the longrunning Max Dehn Seminar, a research seminar
about infinite groups.
Anne Roberts joined the faculty as Adjunct
Assistant Professor in 1976. She received her
Ph.D. at McGill University, and worked as an
instructor at State College at Boston, Professor
at Dawson College and Assistant Professor at
Emmanuel College before coming to Utah. She
has also held positions in Westminster College
and in the Department of Management.
Anne wrote her thesis about
subharmonic functions but she
has been mainly interested in
Mathematics Education. She
has studied how teachers in
colleges and elementary/secondary teachers may collaborate to improve the quality of the mathematics
program for students and training of teachers.
She coordinated the research project, ran and
taught in a month long summer workshop
Elementary Mathematics through Teacher
Partnerships in 1992-1996. She has chaired
three masters candidates in the College of
Science Masters Program for Secondary School
Teachers of Mathematics and Science. Anne has
been a mentor for the college’s ACCESS program
for first year women undergraduate students.
She chaired the Mathematics Education
Committee 2001-2005 and can be credited with
building up our math ed team. She also worked
on a film series on trigonometry (19 videos) for
the department. Anne has been recognized for
her teaching by winning the MAA Intermountain
Section Award for Distinguished College or
University Teaching of Mathematics in 2004, the
ASUU Student Choice Award in 2003 and the
departmental Teaching Award in 2000. Not only
has she taught Mathematics Education courses,
she is also a popular teacher of statistics courses.
Anne will teach another course for us next year.
Degrees Awarded
This year, approximately 50 undergraduate
math majors will receive a baccalaureate degree.
A total of 19 Masters degrees will be awarded.
Students receiving the Ph.D. in 2005-2006 are
Renate Caspers, Nathan Albin, Kenneth Chu,
Matt Clay, Young-Seon Lee, Frank Lynch, Elijah
Newren, Andrew
Oster,
and
Kazuma
Shimomoto. Congrats to all of our graduates!
Faculty Changes
There are several faculty who will not be here
next year. In addition to the retirements already
mentioned, Nick Korevaar and Andrejs Treibergs
will be on sabbatical next year. We also have
three post-docs who are moving on: Daniele
Arcara will be teaching at St. Vincent College in
Latrobe, PA, Bob Bell has accepted a tenuretrack position at Michigan State University (a
joint appointment with the Department of
Mathematics and the Lyman Briggs School of
Science), and Sandra Spiroff is heading to
Seattle University. They will all be missed and
we wish them the best in their future careers.
Math Career Day
Mathematics Career Day was held Thursday,
April 6 and was organized by the USAC. Stan
Inman, Director of Career Services, spoke about
the services they have available for students and
how best to use them. He was followed by Kurt
Dobson, CEO of Starbridge Technologies,
Stephen Dodd of the U.S. Army, William Leung,
Senior Actuary for Beneficial Life, and Tom
Robbins of Idaho Technologies. They talked
about what kinds of opportunities are available
for math majors and how they got to where they
are today. After their presentations the guest
speakers visited with students while everyone
enjoyed refreshments.
Department of Mathematics, University of Utah, 155 South, 1400 East, Salt Lake City, UT 84112
Summer VIGRE Activities
by Kathleen Moore
This summer will not be a quiet time for our
department – there will be several VIGRE-funded activities going on.
A mini-course on SL(2,R) will be held from May
21 through June 3. More than 40 outside graduate students and many local graduate students
will participate. It is funded jointly by the old
VIGRE grant and MSRI. Lectures will be delivered by the three organizers: Bill Casselman
(British Columbia), Dragan Milicic, and Peter
Trapa.
A mini-course on Stochastic Partial Differential
Equations will be held May 8–19, organized by
Davar Khoshnevisan and Firas Rassoul-Agha.
Six outside graduate students and many local
graduate students will participate. Outside
speakers are Robert C. Dalang (Ecole
Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), An Le
(Utah State University), Carl Mueller
(University of Rochester), David Nualart
(Member of Barcelona's Academy of Science;
Universities of Barcelona & Kansas), Boris
Rozovskii (University of Southern California),
and Yimin Xiao (Michigan State University).
This year’s summer group REU program is on
the Geometry of Mobius Transformations and
will run June 4–23. Jason Behrstock and Dan
Margalit are the organizers. Participants are
from Barnard College, Columbia University
Montana State University, Ohio Wesleyan
University, UC Berkeley, University of
Rochester, and Wesleyan University.
The Summer Mathematics Program for High
School Students will be June 12–29 and will be
directed by Christopher Hacon with assistance
from Teresa Cawley and Matt Clay. The program
focuses on number theory, but also includes seminars on a variety of topics given by department
faculty members.
Aftermath is published roughly monthly during
the academic year. Issues of the newsletter are
archived on the web at:
www.math.utah.edu/newsletter
The editorial staff for the 2005-2006 year have
been Angie Gardiner and Andrejs Treibergs. We
appreciate everyone who has contributed articles
and ideas for the newsletter.
Department of Mathematics, University of Utah, 155 South, 1400 East, Salt Lake City, UT 84112